The hat I knitted for my partner’s mother was gifted before I photographed it, but it was well-received and the bamboo Rowan yarn is the perfect thing for a soothing, summer hat. I have 2 more skeins in a silver colorway that I will use for the more ambitious Shedir when I get a moment to do it!

In the meantime I’ve been busy today photographing the undergraduate’s Degree Show that just finished at my college; so much of the work there was really excellent. My very favourite work was the Mundane Appreciation Week project; not only because they gave me shiny pencils and a badge featuring blank file paper to wear, but also because their concept was so life-affirming. They had radios set up all around the college with people describing their relationship to their handbag, their thoughts on shaving and other ‘mundane’ matters. They also had on their conference-style project stand, a great questionnaire you could do relating to everyday and personal preferences, and also asking you to detail your washing-up routine! As well as all this they hosted a programme of events throughout the week relating to everyday events or activities like clearing clutter, maintaining household objects and ironing. I thought the idea was incredibly inclusive, since we all have to live somewhere, we all have to wash our own dishes some way or other, we all have to get dressed and engage with such things as clutter or to-do lists. Not only was this concept well organised, but when I asked them if they could provide some recorded material for my up-and-coming radio show, they swiftly produced a CD for me, along with their business card and other professional accoutrements.

You just can’t beat organisation.

Their table of household-maintenance tools featured above reminds me of M Pawson’s amazing Plug Wiring Diagram printing project; again the idea being to archive or document something ordinarily overlooked in everyday reality, and to then reframe that using some Art means, to make it more interesting or valuable.

For this reason Mundane Appreciation Week also reminded me in some ways of Christine Hill’s Volksboutique in its concept and strategies; it’s an interesting idea, how do you rearrange elements that are completely familiar and re-present them in a way that then changes your relationship to those items? I am really interested in artistic strategies for changing the way we consider daily items and activities.

Other domestic works included Hannah Chidgey’s ongoing performance piece in which a wall was essentially being constructed out of bread ‘bricks’ throughout the show, and Amy Vickery’s work, which included a great video piece and some fantastic sounds. Chidgey’s was a very interesting work; blue and white gingham adorned all the surfaces and she had transformed a college room into a kind of timeless kitchen environment. 1950s radio drifted from some unseen source, the fragrant smell of baking bread wafted sweetly from the bread oven, contemporary ‘Heat’ magazines lay in a pile on one table, and Chidgey herself , as if in a Stepford Wife trance, kept on producing and piling more and more bread loaves. It was very absurd; the smells and the sounds were very comforting, but there was a sinister unreality about the work and something mindless about the repeated action of building a bread wall. Who does the wall keep out? Who does it invite in? Vickery’s work was very different; cardboard boxes, as if just moved up 3 flights of stairs and dumped there, housed a looped recording of the bumps and racket of furniture being moved, while a TV in a darkened bedroom showed a well-considered collage of still-images and recorded sounds. It was a great inversion of the way we normally see domestic events unfolding on TV; in this video work, the lightswitch would be a very static image, for instance, while in the soundtrack, you would hear very clearly the switch being turned on and off. Likewise an image of a bolt on a door was accompanied by the sound of the bolt being opened and closed. It was great to see how sound can ‘animate’ a still image using association and suggestion, and I enjoyed the style of this careful archiving of mundane, domestic events.

In other news I was delighted at the weekend to see some swans hatching out of their eggs at Abbotsbury Swannery, and I got to see a Sweet Cicely plant for myself, which was very pleasing since I have no idea how mine will look when I eventually take the seeds out of the fridge and try to grow them! Sweet Cicely is apparently a very amazing plant with multiple and underrated culinary possibilities!